Philip Schultz, Pulitzer prize winning poet will share his experiences growing up with dyslexia, at Elizabethtown College on February 22nd. I haven’t heard him speak, but have read his book, which pulls no punches when describing the difficulties faced in an unsupportive school environment. His book, My Dyslexia, describes his path to literacy.

Apple’s Entrance into Digital Textbooks: revolutionary?

Apple announced its entrance into digital textbooks, now selling through its iTunes and iBooks online. Though this has been somewhat expected, it’s exciting news.

Believe me, this is not even the tip of the iceberg. I’ve already downloaded samples of the 8 textbooks listed in the iBooks store. While I think these books will become significantly more interactive and creative in design, much like some of the early digital magazines, they’re already way more interesting than standard textbooks.

Imagine how much students backs and shoulders will love when they can carry five 300 page textbooks inside their iPad.

Way less expensive too!

In his book “What the Dog Saw,” based on a collection of his essays and New Yorker articles, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the notion of Puzzles and Mysteries. Gladwell encouraged us to discern whether a problem or challenge to be solved was a puzzle or a mystery.

What about kids with learning disabilities?  Is understanding a student’s learning profile, stemming from an evaluation of information processing, cognitive skills, and achievement strengths and weaknesses, a puzzle or a mystery?

A puzzle, according to Gladwell’s and national-security expert Gregory Treverton’s definition, is something that is solved when there’s enough clear information. The key to solving a puzzle comes through the reporter and the reporting of the information. Given enough data, a puzzle gets solved. Determining Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts was a puzzle, and once enough information was given, puzzle solved. How Iraq would evolve after the fall of Saddam Hussein was anyones’s guess, and still a mystery. With mysteries, too much information can cloud understanding. With the fall of Enron, the giant energy company, the information was there ahead of time. That company released thousand of pages of financial information that should have but didn’t, alert the authorities, even though it was right in front of their faces.  In fact there was so much information it hid the truth.

What about Learning Profiles? We’ve become better and better at giving tests and evaluations that help us understand the nuances of information processing. We’re becoming experts on categorizing the data that comes from these evaluations and with ever increasing precision, describing the profile as Dyslexia. Non-Verbal Learning Disability, Autism Spectrum Disorder, ADHD, and the like.

Understanding how individual children and teenagers will cope with and respond to their individual circumstances is much more difficult to understand. Which kids with learning disabilities will turn to drugs and alcohol? Who will turn their anger inward?  Who will turn their adverse circumstances and challenges into food for success and then thrive?

I know we can, and most likely will, apply more information to these questions, and we might be tempted to think that as a result, we automatically get better at providing the right interventions and predicting outcomes.  But it’s not always that simple. You might suppose for example, that a child from a wealthy family will stand a better chance to succeed in school, or that providing Orton-Gillingham training or another best practice to a child or teenager with reading difficulties will definitely give that kid a leg up. With enough intervention hours and enough improvement, will self-esteem issues disappear?

It doesn’t always work out that way.

One of the keys to making headway in providing holistic interventions and support, as well as predicting trajectories, may be in recognizing  that these questions are both a puzzle and a mystery.

Mysteries are understood and dependent upon more than logic and more than sequential reasoning.

Mysteries are dependent on stripping away some of the excess “information” to find essence.  Steve Jobs and Jon Ive of Apple understood on a design and product level, that simplicity can mean deep understanding and expression of the essence of excellence for a particular machine. In terms of kids with LD, this doesn’t mean discarding or dumbing down our understanding of IQ scores, achievement levels, or processing weaknesses; it may mean adding what’s thought of as right brain processing, intuition, and deep listening (both verbally and non-verbally). It means opening up to the mystery and diversity of cognitive processing, and our gut about what makes a particular child tick, their essence, and the psychological forces that impact both the observed and the observer.

Puzzle or mystery?

This opinion piece in the NY Times, Words Failed, Then Saved Me poignantly reminds us there are different facets of language. To become gifted and talented in one aspect (poetry) and struggle with another (reading) proves again that teachers and parents need to be sleuths of talent as much as they focus on deficits.

Philip Schultz, Pulitzer prize winner for poetry, didn’t begin to learn to read until he was eleven years old. His forthcoming memoir, “My Dyslexia” describes his own journey to literacy.

This is great stuff, well-worth looking over.

Forgotten Letters, a collection of essays and articles by writers with dyslexia, aims to show that the condition makes one different, not ‘less’.

From a recent interview via Gtalk, anthology editor Naomi Folb said: “I think that people assume you have a really hard time and that you find everything very difficult, whereas I don’t see dyslexia in this way. For me it is just a way of thinking.”

Folb is currently a Ph.D student in Denmark who is researching dyslexia. She says, “For my degree, I have interviewed writers and journalists, and also mathematicians and engineers because I want to know how dyslexia is ‘used’ in different professions and how dyslexics perceive dyslexia…”

Here is a recent article in its entirety, as well as a link to the Publishing Company, which is dedicated to promoting and publishing writers who are dyslexic.

Fantastic.

[via Richard Wanderman]Laurie Fais and Malia Bateson

.

Emma Jefferies, is an award winning researcher, designer, educator, writer and more recently, a filmmaker. She also has dyslexia. In a series of videos, she speaks about the challenges and processes she went through while earning her Ph.D (in Design).

Watch this first of a few videos posted on the Innovation Investment Journal website. At about the 1 min: 24 second point, she begins to talk about her non-linear processing, for what non dyslexics is a simple “getting from point A to point B.” The way she understands her variant way of delving into a subject or idea recognizes the positive aspects as well as the challenges.

Later on she talk about certain “attributes” or attitudes she’s developed as a result of challenges her dyslexia presents. Included in these attitudes is “taking responsibility for my own problems or challenges and that they’re not someone else’s to accommodate” (words to that effect). She considers reflectiveness about one’s own processes (such as writing) as being another key ingredient.

I loved watching her bit about not going directly “from A to B.” I noticed years ago that certain students who really struggled with the sequential nature of spelling words (theirs were rife with getting the right letters but in the wrong order), could much more quickly unscramble word jumbles like those in the daily newspapers.

I used to teach a class of 5th graders and I’d put a word jumble on the board for fun. Consistently, this one girl, the most severe dyslexic and the worst speller, was the quickest at unscrambling. I’ve always said that folks who are less encumbered with reliance (or ability) on sequencing may have interesting and creative solutions to problems because they are less stuck in A to B.

Sequencing is vital but in designing a creative solution sometimes comes afterwards, when you need to write it down so others can reproduce the solution.

From the Cass Business School in London, the study draws a link between having dyslexia and business success. I met the author of the study a couple of years ago at a conference. To be fair, she was primarily just reporting what they’d found; namely that upwards of 35% of the successful serial entrepreneurs surveyed in the US identified themselves as dyslexic.

It’s a relatively small sample that responded. From what she said, a few thousand business leaders were queried but only between one and two hundred responded.

There are those that are quite certain that the “dyslexic brain” is embedded by nature with certain attributes that can lead to success in certain areas, visual spatial and 3-D thinking for example. It’s intriguing though unproven. Just as intriguing is some of the other commentary by other folks who are successful and dyslexic. They speak of learning to work extra hard, and discovering the importance of focusing on only the most important tasks in a project (if you’re behind in your schoolwork and basic tasks take longer, this is a necessary skill to learn), as in, “Which assignments this week are the most important to complete?”

Learning to delegate is another.

Seeing the big picture and not getting lost in the details.

All of these may get more attention and thus get more developed by students who are dyslexic.

Many of the same attributes can lead to success in business or any field.

Then again, if you get too buried and marginalized and unsupported, success can become elusive.

What’s the percentage of inmates with learning disabilities?

Can’t wait to see the documentary.

Apparently, one of the themes of the new HBO documentary, “Journey into Dyslexia” is the reported link between dyslexia and successful entrepreneurship.

This opens up so many cans of worms to discuss. I’ll weigh in more later.

Here’s Ben Foss, one of the adults in the documentary, talking about it:

I don’t currently get HBO, but am thinking about ordering the DVD.

Would love to hear from anyone who catches this on HBO.

If anyone sees it at the festival, I’d love to hear your impressions.

Overview: In Brain School, Howard Eaton explores how, applying the principles of neuroplasticitiy, Barbara Arrowsmith Young developed cognitive remediation exercises, founded the Arrowsmith Program and opened the first Arrowsmith School in Toronto, Ontario over 30 years ago. Mr. Eaton then discusses how difficult it was for him to move from traditional remediation methods for learning disabilities to seeing the new possibilities that are due to the ability of the brain to change itself. The lives of nine children are discussed as they start the Arrowsmith Program and then move on to either private or public schools.

Brain School at Amazon.com

Book review by Susan Okie for The Washington Post:

About 5,000 years ago, societies in ancient Sumeria, China and South America invented writing, and in the millennia since, the ability to read has propelled human intellectual and cultural development, vastly expanding our capacity to learn, create, explore and record what we think, feel and know. Reading supplies our brains with an external hard drive and gives us access to our species’s past: In the words of Francisco de Quevedo, it enables us “to listen to the dead with our eyes.”

About the author:

Stanislas Dehaene is a French psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist. He is currently heading the Cognitive NeuroImaging Unit within the NeuroSpin building of the Commissariat A l’Energie Atomique in Saclay near Paris, France’s most advanced brain imaging center. He is also a professor at College de France in Paris, where he holds the newly created chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology. In 2005, he was elected as the youngest member of the French Academy of Sciences.

Reading in the Brain at Amazon

[via Sanford Shapiro]